Four years after One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
was released in theaters around the world
, Torcuato Luca de Tena published
God's crooked lines
.
Let's say, to draw an approximate landscape and without the need to accuse anyone of anything, that
both (the film, which was previously a book, and the book, which is now a film) became strong both in criticizing the repressive and outdated institution of the moment and in the reformulation of the limits of madness itself.
That is to say: Who is crazier: those locked up in the asylum or those who, from the outside, contemplate in astonishment the insane spectacle of their freedom?
Rhetorical questions are like that.
They have echo.
In truth, and to lengthen the introduction, both the Spanish journalist Luca de Tena and the American journalist Ken Kesey (the latter through the intermediary of the director Milos Forman) make good what the philosopher Foucault maintains in the most classic and repeated of his quotes.
And that it is nothing more than madness, it exists only indistinguishably within society, that insanity is nothing more than "the forms of sensibility that isolate it and nothing different from the forms of repulsion that exclude or capture it." ".
Otherwise, the madness is us.
A fact: the two reporters pretended to be crazy to tell what they told knowingly.
Well, Oriol Paulo, a filmmaker struggling in the thriller with the soul of a labyrinth, does not aspire to that much.
Or, better, he aspires to his own, which is another way of aspiring.
His adaptation of the original text lives from the beginning to the end in love not so much with the metaphor as with the mechanism, much more aware of the form than of the other.
Let's say that what interests the director of 'El cuerpo' and 'Contratiempo' is to use madness as the perfect excuse to make the viewer travel to one side of the mirror and the other;
to confuse you, guide you, mislead you, and finally wake you up.
The result is an obsessive and delirious thriller
The film tells the story of private investigator Alice.
Our detective, played with the required solvency by a Barbara Lennie who is getting closer to Ava Gardner, feigns paranoia to be admitted to the psychiatric hospital where a crime has been committed.
What follows is rigorously true with the same clarity as the most obvious lies.
Indeed, sanity and madness, given the case and according to what environments or times, are indistinguishable.
The entire film works like a fine clockwork artifact (not necessarily a bomb) in which each piece matters, each detail indicates a path, each screw (now more than ever given the subject matter) counts.
And it is there, in the careful planning of the structure and the scheduled unveiling of surprises (many), where the film becomes strong.
The problem, which there is, is due to the little interest that
The crooked lines of God
shows towards some characters abandoned to the most elementary stereotype.
And in this way, none of them, despite the solvency of the actors who embody them, transcends their functionality within the mechanism that gives them meaning.
The film disregards the real and almost forced possibility of turning the plot into a metaphor or the text into context.
Keep in mind that the setting refers to a Spain in Transition and, therefore, so close to madness (although its healthiest aspiration was sanity).
Is it possible to imagine a more suggestive scenario for a madhouse?
The director, on the other hand, remains on the sidelines of his own ambition that the plot and the time give him to simply throw himself into the construction of a mechanism that is as tight and precise as it is ultimately soulless.
The result is an obsessive and delusional thriller.
That or a tie-in thriller.
Too bad that, being so much, it's just that.
+Bárbara Lennie and Eduard Fernández once again demonstrate that their mere presence is enough.-It is not clear how many plot twists a thriller can exhibit.
Whatever they are,
The crooked lines of God
takes twice as much.
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